DECODE Project

BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION OF COOPERATIVE DATA PLATFORMS FOR DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY

The Dimmons research team is part of a consortium of expert partners working for solutions to an emerging problem in our increasingly digitalized societies: That of data sovereignity. As more technology is developed and hence new ways of capturing human generated data are available, the power gained by extracting knowledge from these enourmous datasets seems to be concentrating more and more in the hands of few corporate players.

The aim of the EU eunded DECODE project is to break this data extractivist paradigm by proposing instead a new vision of a Data Commons. We will show how blockchain-based technologies can enable users to retain control of their data and that of the devices they use, while making collaborative economy models truly peer-to-peer.

The Data Commons model develops a new political, economic, and legal regime that would recognize social and communal rights to data, so that cities, communities, neighborhoods can claim some sets of data as their own and build their own services- local Ubers and Airbnbs – using that data.

Key objectives of DECODE

Develop a distributed, privacy-aware, and trusted architecture for decentralised data governance and identity management. The platform adopts Attribute Based Cryptography (ABC) to sensitive information, ideas from Certificate Transparency for identification, and Blockchain Technology for federated data access, distribution and resilience.

Prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few platform operators.

Ensure that people are in full control of their data and identity with adaptive, smart, context-dependent access rules running on a cryptographic ledger that define conditions for the access and use of data (and legal/contractual obligations).

Preserve the digital sovereignty of European (and worldwide) citizens.

Validate the platform with use cases providing public value+.

Test and scale in disruptive business models based on an ecosystem of open source decentralised applications, and data commons.